Originally posted by canned ham 91:

I just started this game a week ago. Defeated the first boss, but not the second. Built a boat and went exploring. Found a nice island with black forest and meadows, and even the trader. Also stepped onto the mountain biome but immediately left, and same with the plains biome. Was exploring through a meadows biome, came upon a collection of buildings, and got attacked and immediately killed by drageurs (sp?). So now all my good equipment is stuck in the middle of a settlement of these brutal beasts (were probably 5 or 6 of them) . Any way my newb character can get my equipment back without being repeatedly killed?

I thought players weren't supposed to encounter beasts in biomes that hadn't open up for them yet.

Help!

As a newb player myself, I can tell you this (WARNING: there might be content spoilers in case you don't want to know what's up ahead):
- The game has linear progression and a soft-gatekeeping mechanic. Basically, you can move freely around the world but mobs work as a gear check and materials tend to be only obtained through boss progression (they drop items that are vital to access the resources of the next biome). So trying to skip biomes is not only dangerous but unrewarding.
- It seems like you ran into a draugr village. I just died today that way. The swamp boss spawned so far that forced me to sail and I landed on a Meadow thinking it was safe. Saw a village and I thought it was going to be easy to build a settlement but it was filled with draugrs. Fortunately, I've been in the swamps enough to kill them. The aetgir/stagbreaker works well vs them in the meadows because you're not wet and they tend to be in buildings and that weapon deals dmg through walls. The problem is that there were plains next to it and that's like 2 biomes higher so I got 2 shot by a deathsquitto because it came to the meadows while chasing something else.
- Sailing too far is very dangerous, specially if you claim a bed in a settlement and move far from it. The further you go from the spawn point the stronger the enemies and the higher chances to find higher biomes surrounding low level biomes like meadows which can lead to monsters from those higher biomes "leaking" into your biome when chasing a deer or something. You can get soft-locked like that if you can't access your corpse or your boat to get out of the island/continent you got into (since you have no gear and no tools you can't gather anything and you can't go back home because you sailed there so you're forever spawning into a certain death). So when sailing I'd advice you to either not claim a bed and just hide during the night or build a portal in your base and bring materials to build another one in your destination to tag it and link it so you can either get out of there quick or, in case you died without claiming your bed, go back to retrieve your corpse if possible and bounce.